WYSIWIS and relaxed-WYSIWIS

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Notes from Gareth Smith's Cooperative Virtual Environments: lessons from 2D multi user interfaces:

Early 2D multi user interface systems supported shared interfaces by presenting exactly the same image of the application to all users. This simple replication of the system’s image secured a founding abstraction for multi user interfaces: What You See is What I See (WYSIWIS). (...) Experiences with these systems in the CoLab environment highlighted problems with the WYSIWIS approach, Stefik concluded that “ WYSIWIS (What You See is What I See) is too in$exible, if strictly interpreted, and must be relaxed to better accommodate important interactions in meetings”. (...) The notion of relaxed WYSIWIS provides each individual user with the ability to configure their shared user interface to best suit their working needs.collaboration aware.

An example taken from an old application called JAMM. Each participant's cursor position in the text is represented with a uniquely colored and named telepointer. The participant in this screenshot is named "Solaris User" and uses green, while the remote participant is named "PC User" and uses red:

Why do I blog this? I was digging the internet for some references about location-relaxed WYSIWIS for my dissertation.

web/internet

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I am often mesmerized by how people use the terms "Internet" and "Web" interchangeably, as if they were synonymous. Sometimes even in meetings at work, the discuss ends with the differentiation pointed by a person fed up with this (taken from weboepedia):

The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.

The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. (...) The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the the Web to share information. The Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape, to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks.

The Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the Internet. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.

Why do I blog this? Even though this is a mistake and a common one, it's interesting to see how people name things and it seems that this mistake is made in english or in other language (for example my mother tongue: french). However, I am not nerdy enough to take the piss when people interchange the words, what is rather intriguing is the underlying reasons for that.

Besides, I really prefer the term "information super-highway" which definetely rocks ("les autoroutes de l'information" in french) because it can lead to tremendous wording such as "having a homepage on an information superhighway" or "traffic jam on an information super-highway".

This also reminds me the discussion Julian Bleecker had about "being in the Internet" or "on the Internet", or saying "the InternetS".

Mobile phones and locality

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Sorting out some old quotes for my dissertation, I found that one by Andrew Curry (The Henley Centre) in my notes:

« Design predictions were that 80 per cent of information would be pan European, 20 per cent local, but it is actually the other way around. Phones are about mobility, but they are also about localness and specific regionality. They are about a configuration of place that is a quite local sense of place. Phones are about remapping the locality. »

Why do I blog this? this nicely expresses how mobile communications have the potential to reinvent our ideas about the local.

About "technosocial situations"

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Japanese academics (Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe) defines the concept of ‘technosocial situations’ to refer to technologically-mediated social orders (= Erving Goffmans’ theory of social situation : isomorphism between physical space and social situation). This term is explained in Technosocial Situations: Emergent Structurings of Mobile Email Use by Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe. Some excerpts that clarify:

In his review of Erving Goffman’s theories of social situation, Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) suggests that the presumed isomorphism between physical space and social situation needs to be questioned when we take into account the influence of electronic media. He sees the work of Goffman and other “situationists” as presenting the essential insight that social identity and practice are embedded in and contingent on particular social situations. He suggests, however, that these theories fail to take into account how electronic media cross boundaries between situations previously held to be distinct. (...) We propose the term “technosocial situations” as a way of incorporating the insights of situationist theory into a framework that takes into account technologically mediated social orders. As Meyrowitz proposes, more and more, social orders are built through the hybrid relation between physically co-located and electronically mediated information systems. (...) We believe that it is crucial to retain attentive to the local particulars of setting, context, and situation in the face of these translocal flows if we are to avoid a technical determinist argument that these technologies necessarily lead to a blurring of spatial and social boundaries. Electronic media have effects that break down certain prior social boundaries, as Myerowitz proposes, but they also have effects of constructing and reifying other social boundaries.

Why do I blog this? It's been a while that I run across that term in different places and I am not that conformable using it because I found it very broad. That's why I got back to the article in which I've seen it first. The authors describes mobile email use as a new technosocial situation (my notes about it here).

Sucking jacks to make music

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"Les poissons autistes" (i.e. autists fishes) is a swiss band that have a nice way of tinkering artifacts to produce music

It's only at the end of 2001 that Simon and Babey began again to create their own "music" (...). Struck by a sudden inspiration during a drunken night, they plugged jacks into the inputs of a tape machine and then sucked and manipulated the free extremities of the cables to produce some particularly irritating and saturated noises. (...) Simon and Babey have since then perfected their technique of sonic collage, assembling on the computer recordings of various noises made on Minidisc, instruments (trumpet, flute, accordion, guitar, bass), contact-miked objects and sounds produced by different machines diverted from their normal use (guitar effect pedals, reverb racks and other old stuff).

Why do I blog this? the mouth is an unexplored are to interact with artifacts (be they digital or not), this seems to be a good and visual way to innovate in music production. Moreover, I am crazy of contact-miked sounds, especially mixed with delay/reverb effects.

A living structure

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The blog of the EPFL/ECAL joint project nicely summarizes the results of a workshop they recently set. A project developed in this context is about "How nature can be resumed to a simple mathematical formula" by Florian Pittet & Margaux Renaudin:The idea is to create a whole living structure: Using light as a protector and as a living manifestation, the structure interact with the walker that pases threw her by sensors, and glows all around him. (...) Light will play an essential role by creating a cocoon that follows the human, by a gradual glowing light cycles, using a new kind of neon tubes that can fade out and have a more organical kind of light. Structures can be supported by a kind of skin that can tense the volume or follows the movement of the structure.

Their description is quite interesting (as a work in progress) and there are plenty of pictures and videos to precise their thoughts. More here.

Why do I blog this? this is IMHO an interesting example of "landscape as interface" through glowing lights based on passers-by movements. Kind of an instantiation of a ubiquitous computing environment... Besides the blog is great to keep track of those guys from lausanne are up to).

Rules of engagement

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For potential readers of Pasta and Vinegar, short hints about how things work here:

  • I started this blog 4 years ago as a repository for stuff I find interesting, pertinent, relevant and weird with regards to: my research, my interest and my projects. It started from a daily muse about issues I wanted to address in my PhD research. It slowly evolved and is now a less often updated description of what I find curious in my work. The topics depend upon the projects I am working on (sometimes it's more gaming than ubiquitous computing or foresight/innovation).
  • The first purpose of this is to keep track of stuff I encounter, it's a personal tool for me. And I find interesting to share stuff with to others, because it creates connections and conversations. I don't "spend" time on blogging, I use it as a tool for my work practice. Though, it might troublesome to define what I do: user experience research/foresight covers both my academic research and more concrete work (consultancy or user experience research for video game companies).
  • The topic of this blog is mostly about my interests: how certain technologies are used, how they are designed, what they will be in the near future. It's hence a super-messy list of posts that can be described as trends or weak signals of what happen today that might unveil the near-future.
  • Yes there are odd things posted here, both professional and weird. Why? because I do think there's a coherence between all the things I am interested in. This mix is made of pasta (research/science/serious material) and vinegar (awkward stories/artifacts/things). If there is a word to describe this blog, it would surely be hirsute (a french word that means... check it here), and it's on purpose because the world is like that.
  • No ads? besides, I am hosted by a university server.
  • I may have the worse url in the world but mmh I started like this and it's good to have stability on the information super-highways.
  • The "why do I blog this?" is really a personal thing, I try to describe why the stuff I blog about has implications to what I do, so if you're not familiar with what I do, it might seems cryptic.
  • Sometimes I may do interview, I am not a journalist but I like to gather thoughts/ideas.
  • People do comment here, there are conversations, private and public. And yes comments are filtered, mostly because there is way too much spam (and sometimes rudeness, which is not accepted. However, it's OK (and good) to disagree on issues.
  • Conversations can also be held by emails or offline - people phone or chat.
  • I am quite active - there will be times when I don't post. Conversely, I read every email but I cannot answer every email.

(Inspired or based on David's rules).

Nanoloop

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Nanoloop (by Oliver Wittchow) is a real-time sound editor for the Game Boy Advance:

Nanoloop is a synthesizer / sequencer for the Nintendo Game Boy systems. Stored on a normal game cartridge, it allows to produce nice electronic music without further hardware, using either headphones or an external amplifier (home stereo, active speakers, etc) as sound output.

Why do I blog this? that seems to be a curious tool to turn a portable console into a musical device. I like things like that, when an artifact is détournée.

Citizen game

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People who reads french and who are interested by the video game industry should have a glance at Citizen Game by Nicolas Gaume. It is basically the story of Kalisto, a french video game company based in Bordeaux as told by its founder/CEO. It goes through the whole success story till the bankruptcy in 2002.

I knew most of the stuff described in the book from my experience with game studios but the book puts that in a very good perspective. Some lessons: - the description of the video game economy based on development studios, editors, producers, subcontractors, distributors, banks, VCs... and how it evolved over time from garage-like cliques to more structured institutions. - in line with this issue, the book also shows an interesting shift in the CEO's work from helping creating games/teams to managing the relationships between funding institutions. Besides, Kalisto was french and it appeared that the "environment" was not really good for an innovative company. For that matter the description about the value of the company's assets by the stock exchange reviewers (COB) is very intriguing. - the difficulty to have a sustainable business model for a development studio. People who're developing games are the weakest link: there's low number of editors which fund projects, the difficulty for developers to hire lots of people versus having a sustainable activity in the long run. The company seemed to do a very good job with more than 3 productions at the same time. - the fact that all of this is a human thing and both the good and bad parts of the story are due to human behaviors: the gathering of a great team to create the company (and the games) and the bankruptcy caused by troublesome relationships, misunderstandings, lack of comprehension from funders...

What is also pertinent is to see how the authors has been described as a great entrepreneurs during the tech bubble (when the company was doing great) and how everybody dismissed him afterwards. It's not very good to fail at something in France, but this story is not described in the book.

"We experience spaces not only by seeing but also by listening"

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Barry Blesser recently sent me sample chapters of his book called "Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?" (written with Linda-Ruth Salter, at MIT Press). The main thesis propelled by this book is that social relationships are strongly influenced by the way that space changes sound ("aural architecture"), an issue I can fully agree with given my background in cognitive psychology and ergonomics. Some excerpts:

The composite of numerous surfaces, objects, and geometries in a complicated environment creates an aural architecture. (...) consider displacing familiar sounds to unfamiliar environments. Transported to an open desert, urban traffic would not have the aural personality of a dense city environment. (...) In addition to providing acoustic cues that can be interpreted as objects and surfaces, aural architecture can also influence our moods and associations (...) Aural architecture can also have a social meaning. For example, the bare marble floors and walls of an office lobby loudly announce the arrival of visitors by the re-sounding echoes of their footsteps.

Why do I blog this? I am interested in how the environment structures social and cognitive interactions, therefore this book seem to deal with that issue from the auditory perspective. It reminds me of a study I did five years ago about which sort of awareness cues FPS players (Quake II...) deployed while competing; in the interview, lots of players told me that they were listening to footsteps noises as an indicator of which weapons the opponents were carrying.

Track Santa

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For geowanking kids: NORANDSANTA is a website that broadcast information about "santa tracking":

Detecting Santa all starts with the NORAD radar system called the North Warning System. This powerful radar system has 47 installations strung across the northern border of North America. NORAD makes a point of checking the radar closely for indications of Santa Claus leaving the North Pole on Christmas Eve.

It seems that they also use satellites, NORAD jet fighter and "santa cams" ("ultra-cool high-tech high-speed digital cameras that are pre-positioned at many places around the world"). See Paris below:

Why do I blog this? even though this leaves me sorta speechless, it's yet another XXX-tracking platform.

Sonotree

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Sonotree is a curious project by Mathias Forbach (previously at ecal now at bread and butter) that the defines as "a cubic wood box where you can insert branches to do music for dead trees"

Sonotree is a music box automaton where input switches are branches. The interface between branches and sounds is Pure Data, a sounds and video dedicated open-source program particularly used in vjaying. But here, we use it only for the sound, because "sonotree" is not a screen related installation, but its programming is visual. (...) To start the music, you have to put a branch into the box. It generates sounds, change the frequency, do bass from that sound and trebles. It's like giving "life" to the dead branches, as they have something to say

Why do I blog this? that sounds like a curious use of wooden stuff :) More seriously I love this idea of letting so-called artefacts (like dead branches) expressing sounds.. so much for the agency of pieces of wood, take it as a new interaction partners.

"Bruno Latour forecasts the future"

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A quite compelling title for a blogpost right?(Via Daniel Kaplan), last month I haven't parsed the whole New Scientist's special issue about 50 years foresight. There is this intriguing short one by Bruno Latour that makes sense:

In 50 years, social scientists will be able to visualise the connections between human organisations and technological objects. Today we know how to visualise technological systems using scientific images and technical drawings, but we have no idea of how to hook those designs up with the arrays of emails, spreadsheets, blogs and pieces of paper that organise the people who operate those systems. Why should that matter? Think of the Columbia disaster: there were thousands of drawings of the space shuttle and its parts, but none to represent the organisation of NASA. Once Columbia had exploded, everyone realised that faulty procedures were just as much to blame as faulty parts.

Devising connecting tools is a major but feasible undertaking. Fifty years is a safe bet: it is about the time it took in the Renaissance to invent perspective in the first place. Why do I blog this? well, I fully concur with Latour's description and I sorta like that this forecast is not about crappy superintelligent computers or quantum leaps into parallel universe. What is interesting here is the description the authors makes of potential connection between human and non-human actors. It might seem a bit cryptic but there are good implications to draw here concerning blogjects and the participation of objects in social webs.

Phantom ring

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According to the Urban Dictionnary, a phantom ring is:

Term used to describe when someone thinks they hear their cell-phone ringing or feel it vibrating in their pocket when it's actually not.

"Excuse me a sec... aw sorry, it was a phantom ring." or "Yes! Finally she called me back *reaches in pocket* Dang it.. phantom ring."

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of "phantom" phenomenon, very well connected to perceptual issues in cognitive sciences and the current trend about "magic" in the ubiquitous computing discourse.

"Superimposed, intertwined and hybridised" layers

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A good quote that I found in a paper by Karen Martin:

Now they [architects] must contemplate electronically augmented, reconfigurable, virtual bodies that can sense and act at a distance but that also remain partially anchored in their immediate surroundings...Increasingly the architectures of physical space and cyberspace – of the specifically situated body and of its fluid electronic extensions – are superimposed, intertwined and hybridised in complex ways. [Mitchell, 1995]

Mitchell, W. J. 1995. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of superimposed/intertwined/hybridised layers of diverse XXX (call it as you want: information flows, data streams, virtual worlds, augmented space, information super-highway being my favorite). So what about: (1) visualizing them (materializing them?), (2) bridging them, (3) observing gradients (from ultraconnected hip places to electronic ghettos or is ultraconnected the ghettos and hip unconnected places?)...

Technologies for pervasive gaming

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Among the last deliverable of the iPerg project, I found this very interesting presentation by Staffan Bjork entitled Using the limits of technology (5Mb, .ppt) that gives a very good overview of the technologies available to deploy pervasive games. He present SMS, bluetooth, GPS, RFID tags with interesting examples of how they had been used to create compelling "big games" (I don't know if I like that word that the author did not use in this talk). Each technology the author presented was described with its potential affordance for gaming:

- SMS: support short gameplay sessions, focus on textual/language aspects (slang), easy to support players to create content and use their imagination - Bluetooth: Make physical proximity a gameplay element - GPS: Make understanding GPS shadows a skill in the game, make understanding real-world features a part of the gameplay - RFID tags: Combines RFID tags with GPS: GPS for general positioning, RFID for specific.(...) Mask technology as magic, i.e. unreliable technology becomes unreliable magic which fits the theme

Why do I blog this? What I appreciated is the fact that the author states how pervasive games "typically makes use of new technology because they make new experiences possible) " AND at the same time the same "new technology often is not stable, has not a high enough granularity and have non-intuitive limits". The iPerg perspective was hence to develop technology to support gameplay (and not the other way around).

"Big games" and environmental space

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Parsing tons of papers, articles, documents and pdf that I accumulated in the last few months, I ran across this article in Vodafone's Receiver: Big Games and the porous border between the real and the mediated by Frank Lantz. In this short piece, the author describes what he means by "big games", i.e. "Big Games are human-powered software for cities, life-size collaborative hallucinations, and serious fun". Some excerpts I find pertinent regarding my research: (picture from a project called “N8Spel” a project by Just van den Broecke, not cited in this paper but I quite like it)

Imaginary places, constructed from code, are now being represented not just as pixel grid windows into synthetic 3D environments, but mapped onto the actual 3D environments in which we live. Called "Big Games", these large-scale, real-world games occupy urban streets and other public spaces and combine the richness, complexity, and procedural depth of digital media with physical activity and face-to-face social interaction.

He then describes games such as ConqWest, Mogi Mogi, PacManhattan, Superstar, Can You See Me Now, Uncle Roy, Botfighters... And describes how the urge to use spatial environment as a playful space did not come out from the blue: children's neighborhood games (like Red Rover, hide and go seek, and kickball or Capture the Flag), Assassin/Killer game, skateboarding and Parkour, location-based art activities of the late 20th century, Live action role-playing. And those activities share some common purposes:

a desire to push game experiences beyond traditional boundaries of time and space. But there is another, complementary desire within conventional computer and videogames themselves. Over the last 10 or 15 years, these games have developed a profound obsession with play dynamics of 3D spaces, architecture, and environments. (...) In some ways, Big Games are a natural extension of this obsession with environmental exploration and social dynamics as gameplay subjects.

The author hence describes how mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies are a catalyst for big games creation. And finally, his thought about spatial practices are very interesting:

There is no longer a clear, well-defined boundary between the virtual spaces and interactive systems of our digital experience and the concrete, tangible aspects of our physical experience. Even as high-resolution computer graphics make the simulated worlds inside our computers more realistic, the actual world outside our computers is behaving more and more like data. (...) Regardless of the technology with which they are implemented, Big Games reflect a change in perspective brought about by mobile, pervasive, and ubiquitous technologies. Even Big Games that use chalk on sidewalks to make a citywide puzzle, or appropriate the archaic technology of payphones to make a game of urban tactics, are made possible by a shift in how we perceive our environment brought about by the new relationship between space and computing. (...) Whatever else they are, these games are primarily about connecting people – a way to reclaim public space as a site for a new kind of shared experience.

Why do blog this? because it gives a very good summary of "big games", which I am partly interested in my research (I use big games to study how people collaborate and use location-awareness features). On a different note, it seems that in the location-based/geowankin scene, the term "big" now receives more and more interest. See the "big here challenge" or how Fabien describes it (or even Matt Jone's video!). Finally, what the author stress in his conclusion (big games to reclaim public space), is exactly something Mauro and I wrote about three years ago in the following paper: To Live or To Master the city: the citizen dilemma or in this short pdf report I dropped on the web: Augmenting Guy Debord’s Dérive: Sustaining the Urban Change with Information Technology. The report only focuses on the use of LBS to foster new public space practices.

Affective computing for laptops?

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I am not a huge follower of the affective computing trend, but once in a while I read stuff about it, just to keep me updated about progress in that area. There is a piece in the Christian Science monitor entitled What if your laptop knew how you felt?, which deals with this issue. Some parts I found relevant. First about the main principles:

Computers can now analyze a face from video or a still image and infer almost as accurately as humans (or better) the emotion it displays. It generally works like this:

1. The computer isolates the face and extracts rigid features (movements of the head) and nonrigid features (expressions and changes in the face, including texture); 2. The information is classified using codes that catalog changes in features; 3. Then, using a database of images exemplifying particular patterns of motions, the computer can say a person looks as if they are feeling one of a series of basic emotions - happiness, surprise, fear - or simply describe the movements and infer meaning.

Now, in terms of applications:

"Mind Reader" [MIT] uses input from a video camera to perform real-time analysis of facial expressions. Using color-coded graphics, it reports whether you seem "interested" or "agreeing" or if you're "confused" about what you've just heard. (...) Researchers interviewed for this story concur that emotion recognition appeals to the security industry, which could use it in lie detection, identification, and expression reading. [Quite scary, isn't it] (...) there is peril in working with "fake data" if this technology is used in security. Yes, machines may be able to read fear, but fear is not necessarily an indicator of bad intentions [Phew...]

Why do I blog this? well, as I said, I am not very well versed into this domain so it's good to discover the main principles of such applications for pure cultural background. It's also curious to think about the underlying cultural assumptions of such an approach to interacting with machines. And finally, I am looking forward to see how this could be tinkered/hacked by artists in curious ways.